Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Blair the Fundamentalist

There’s a series of programmes called ‘The Blair Years’ on TV at the moment, and I managed to catch part of one of them the other night. It was dealing with 9/11 and Iraq. What struck me was Blair’s position on it, after all this time and after he has left office. What we have, he convicted, is “a visceral struggle between what is right and what is wrong.”

Yes, he really does believe this. The man has learnt nothing from the war, all it has done is give birth to his latent fundamentalism. When there is a war, you have to look at it from both sides if you are going to make any sense of it. And it seems pretty obvious to me that the War on Terror is rooted in Arab resistance to western influence. It’s as simple as that. A bit like how many European tribes must have felt at the time of the Romans.

The West needs the Arab oil, and they’re going to make sure they have enough control and influence in the Middle East to safeguard their supplies. You can’t expect the West to behave otherwise. Nor can you expect the Arabs not to resent this influence in their homeland (for which they get nicely paid). This tension is going to continue for as long as we need their oil. Of course, it isn’t put like this by either side. America is ‘The Great Satan’, and the West is struggling against ‘Evil’.

If anything is ‘evil’, it is the fundamentalism you find on both sides that makes any sort of understanding of the situation impossible. If anything is ‘evil’, it is the way Bush and Blair see the ‘war’ as a battle of good versus evil, with themselves of course on the side of ‘good’.

It is hard to believe that Tony Blair is so foolish and superficial, so psychologically primitive. But he is, and we elected him 3 times to run the UK. Which doesn’t say much for we the British people, or for the American people who elected Bush twice.

Before the Iraq War, Tony Blair went to see the Pope to try to get his blessing. Yes, he really did do this. You couldn’t make something like this up, it is priceless comedy. It also makes it clear that Blair was unknowingly engaged on a medieval crusade against Islam. To the Pope’s credit (and I’m not inclined to give Popes much credit), he didn’t give his blessing.

It is gradually coming out that Blair was always much bigger on God than he let on. He was afraid, rightly, of being seen as a ‘nutter’. He has for some years been close to converting to Catholicism, the main barrier appearing to be political considerations.

Tony Blair was born 6 May 1953 at 6.10am in Edinburgh. He has Moon in 10th House Aquarius in a t-square with Sun in Taurus and Pluto in Leo. The challenge of Pluto is to find your own inner power, your own independent sense of confidence and strength. If you are unaware, if you are not up to this challenge, you will look for this sense of power and authority outside of yourself, and this is exactly what Blair has done with his religious certainty and crusade against ‘evil’. And through his need to be in a position of power. Unlike many leaders, he went straight from being PM to being a Middle East envoy on behalf of the major powers.

Aquarius at its worst can be rigidly ideological, which is where his Moon comes in, and we also see it in his Jupiter-Mars conjunction on the ASC. The fixity of his t-square doesn’t help either.

It was Neptune which liberated the fundamentalist within. Up until 9/11, Blair had been a bit timid as PM, trying to please everybody. After 9/11, and particularly in the run-up to the Iraq War, he became the opposite, he was going to do what he believed regardless of popularity. Neptune made its first exact crossing to his Moon a month before the Iraq War, and since then has squared his Sun and is now in the final stages of opposing his Pluto. As it was Neptune that was activating his chart, we can see what happened in terms of what he would have felt to be an Enlightenment, a waking up to his true mission of battling evil in the specific form of Islamic ‘terrorists’; from the outside, many of us would see Neptune as having created delusion and guru-inflation. As an astrologer, my job is to describe both sides rather than say which is ‘correct’. As an opinionated blogger, I have no doubt which is correct!

They say there is no-one so ‘ex’ as an ex-Prime Minister, and I was slightly taken aback when I realised that Tony Blair still has transits going on, that he is not in suspended animation. Neptune is still finishing with his t-square, and what it seems to be creating is this mad fundamentalist, reminiscent of his hero Margaret Thatcher after she had finished as PM.

Her time as PM was characterised by a series of major Pluto transits, and there were more to come in the 5 years following her demise. The same applies to Tony Blair, who will have Neptune squaring his Mars-Jupiter-ASC in 5-6 years time. It will probably mark his appointment as Archbishop, on his ascent towards the Papacy! At any rate, it would not surprise me if, like Thatcher, we see him becoming more rigid, more of a caricature of himself, over the coming years.

Hi Dharma - I've been watching "The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard" on the US PBS stations, about an ordinary house wife who becomes the PM. Have you seen it? It's really interesting to see what happens when someone steps in and says exactly what she thinks with no political b.s.

Twilight, I agree in theory about separating church and state, but then we'd miss out on the wonderful comedy of our PM appointing the bishops. I think a consitution needs its comical aspects to stop us taking it too seriously.

I think the real danger is that the leader gets religion, as we've seen recently, that's what you need a law against, though I don't know how you'd frame it! Maybe an oath in which he puts his loyalty to the country before his loyalty to God?

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Barry Goddard

Astrology has its roots in ancient augury, in reading the intentions of the gods. It contains truth, but not in a literal, scientific way. It is a way of thinking, natural to human beings, that has been largely forgotten today. An astrology chart cannot be ‘read’ like any other text: rather, the astrologer uses the stars and planets in a ritual way that allows his or her intuition - the daemon, the gods, the unconscious - to speak. And the emphasis is not on foretelling the future but on how to live well, what attitude to take to life, how in other words to live in accord with the intentions of the gods. I mainly do readings by skype. If you’re interested, email me at bwgoddard1@aol.co.uk. I was born 12 Feb 1958, 18.50, London